Moving from London to San Francisco
corp.fightmymonster.com
corp.fightmymonster.com
The three people on the "Who We Are" page seem qualified enough to get O-1 (Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement) visas, perhaps.. but that's the interesting part of the story that's missing. Or is it in another post?
Converting to Sterling, you’ll probably pay about 20% more than what you’d expect for similar quality engineers in London.
I'm sure many in London would be intrigued where all the typical full-time software engineer salaries of £62k-£78k are to be had ;-) Maybe I talk to the wrong people or we're just more secretive in the UK but it's not often I hear salaries like that being thrown about.
(I work remotely for a CA company. I just live here; the salary hit is bigger than 20% (I had the corresponding US job offer, H-1B visa etc.) but in my estimation it's worth it for my life preference function.)
On your job though, are you saying that you took a salary hit of 20% just because you live in the UK or work remotely?
I'll start by acknowledging that I've got biases since I've spent my career in finance, so the following is my opinion based on what I've seen so far.
Firstly, the big money software roles tend to be in Hedge Funds and Prop Firms, the culture of which (especially if they're smaller) is very start-up like. Long hours, often stressful, often full of rapid pivots as traders change their mind, markets change or management alters course. A lot of smart people some of whom come with big egos but they generally know their stuff.
Alternatively, in a bank the money tends to be good if you're working for a trading desk in a Front Office role, or working with Quant groups. In those roles you're generally seen as a business function (i.e. you help them make money) rather than a technology function (i.e. you cost them money). You get the same long hours and stress as above especially if anything goes wrong or the markets are going crazy - keeping the desk trading and the pricing right come above all else.
Risk can also come with good money - when you're software is used to analyse the performance of several billion dollars worth of trades, they're willing to pay to make sure it's done right.
All the above is likely going to be a mix of C++ and .Net depending on which side of runs-fast or develops-fast a project comes down on. Often numerical libraries will be in C++ and the rest of the project in .Net since interop between the two is pretty easy. In hedge funds especially there might be some language-de-jour as well, I've run into Scala, Python, K and OCaml at various funds. If you're with a banking quant group, there might well be F# there as well.
A lot of the problems in those roles are going to revolve around Maths (pricing, analytics), high availability (you don't really want your trading platform to crash), big data (teasing information out of databases with millions of ticks per day) and working with real time data (if your pricing is a second out of sync with the markets, expect to lose money) - all of which I consider to be interesting problems to work on, and far more interesting than the work at a lot of start ups I've heard about, although the atmosphere is probably fairly similar.
Now if you're working in the back office... that's where I might expect to find Java and Banality!
There are other differences though, most notably holiday time. I would have only had 10 days in the US, not really up for negotiation (it was how the company rewarded seniority). It was probably the biggest deal-breaker, and really stupid if you think about it: what would make a new immigrant's life easier than the ability to visit family and friends without burning a year's worth of vacation time? The only compromise they were willing to make was 5 extra days for the first year :)
In London there are definitely a fair amount of people making £100k+ writing software, and outside of finance. The key difference is they are on the contract market. There seems to be a ceiling on perm salaries even if someone is worth the money.
Very curious about these well paying non-finance contracts though - I've been thinking about leaving the financial world, but so far the salary differentials have been stopping me. I've not worked outside of finance, so appropriate places to find those type of contracts is an unknown to me.
I'd love to know what kind of requirements for the O-1 visa apply in the context of our industry, as that seems the strongest visa of them all by far. I assume nobody can talk about their experiences publicly as the whole process goes through immigration lawyers and I guess immigration aren't going to be too pleased with publicly available "instructions" on how to legally enter the country, either.
I know of two other people personally who've gotten O-1s after having tech books published with major tech publishers (coupled with the high salary requirement and other minor community fame, of course). But we're not talking Nobel Prize levels of fame here.
He couldn't get an O-1, he was told that "a Nobel prize would help"